


Footprints

by Sententia



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 20:43:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/853857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sententia/pseuds/Sententia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toph and Iroh's first encounter leaves an imprint on them both. Hinted at I/T.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footprints

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wei/gifts).



Toph has always been grounded; she has never been a different way to live. Her soul seeps into the sand with each step, staining the grains in her shade of stability. She leaves behind a thought, a memory, a pillar of strength with each footprint, because Toph’s strength isn’t merely what ties her to the earth but what she leaves behind.

Iroh notices her eyes first, because Iroh is a sum of so many parts, some of which have been brought up in a culture that remembers souls through their owner’s eyes rather than their footprints. He recalls the tales he was told around fires when he was a child, of how eyes that cannot reflect the heat of a flame possess the nothingness of a stone. Too many from his kingdom still see life still as merely an extension of fire, and the soul as something that is an accessory that only those with power truly own. It is perhaps why they are so good at conquering, but so poor at producing leaders.

And so Iroh notices her eyes first, and sees the white of granite, the smooth lines of rock. He notices her feet second, because Iroh has a soul of his own and one that is only shaped by flame and not torched by it. Skin darkened and bruised, embedded with grains of dirt and soot and stone, the young girl’s feet speak in ways that eyes could only wish to communicate. There is a lifetime in those feet, and it is one that Iroh instantly identifies with. Hardship. Pain. A solid ground from which everything is – from which everything must _be_ – based from. They are feet that navigate terrain in the same way souls travel across emotional high and lows. There lingers still near Toph’s toes the shallow hints of aged frostbite, from times when Toph has been frozen in a world where her own strengths have been put on ice. The uneven arch of her sole screams of a plasticity that only comes from navigating uneven ground where uncertainty bends the foot with each and every foot step. The strength of her Achilles heel, the muscles that flex when she simply twiddles her toes – this is someone who is used to not only being in the line of fire, but fighting the flames. 

Ice and fire and wind and uncertainty and everything else the world has to throw at this small girl with such powerful feet. 

Toph is so hypnotically grounded, because the world around her is everything but.

When Iroh first meets Toph, it is her eyes that he notices first. 

It is through her footprints that he finds her again.

***

Iroh has always brewed tea, it is as fundamental to his being as breathing. He has special blends for trauma, ones spiced perfectly when a good old fashioned kick-up-the-behind is the most beneficial antidote. He knows the role flavour plays in emotion, and how potent taste can be in shaping a young (or stubbornly old) mind.

When Toph first parts with the mysterious man she finds has somehow fallen behind a rock, she leaves with the smooth taste of tea on her tongue. She carries it with her throughout the rest of the day, sweet and gentle, and so unlike how she sees herself. It settles her stomach and her mind, but perhaps more powerfully it settles her tongue. Never enough to numb it, nor to blunt the importance of what it allows her to say.

But the tea gives her a hint of softness, a smoothness to communicate what needs to be said without the bitter bite of a cup that has been brewed too long.

That taste is potent, and it allows her a spike of reflection that she finds difficult to find sometimes through her other senses. 

But it is just a taste, and it fades as the day elongates into night.

In the morning, she is left instead with the sound of the other man. Not his words, as insightful as they most certainly had been. Toph is merely of the fire nation, or the water nation, or the air nation if she hears someone speak and only hears syllables and sentences. There is so much more to sound than what is presented on the surface, but it takes more than a working set of ears to truly connect to the meaning that comes with the soften sounds, the most billowing of noises. Toph instead feels the imprint of his gravelly voice, and how it vibrated up through her feet and tingled through her toes. There had been a gravity in that tone that spoke of mountains instead of pebbles, and that feeling curls deep inside of her. It doesn’t unsettle her, not like Sokka sometimes does with his humor and warmth, his hidden insecurities and pain.

The certainty, the roundedness of Iroh – she learns later that this is his name – solidifies her.

It is a feeling that stays, long after it has any right to.

Perhaps, it even stays forever, metamorphosing from a standard piece of charcoal (ha! As if a simple piece of anything really exists!) into a stone that is fired through with just a hint of fire. 

When she meets up with Iroh again, it is through following his laughter, and all the emotion that it encompasses.

***

There are many more encounters, because fate and souls and laughter are all but facets of the same prism. Some of their encounters have to do with Iroh’s beloved, often insane nephew, some of them do not. Some are tied to saving the world from a forever fire that threatens once more to consume the world in the darkest shade of red, some encounters occur simply on a rainy day in a shared cave.

Sometimes, eventually, there are no explanations for their encounters at all, just a preference for two sets of footprints and a cup of perfectly brewed tea.

It is then that they stop becoming encounters altogether, and become a truth shared between just the two of them.


End file.
